How often do you read that phrase ‘New Deal’ and roll your eyes, whichever government is in charge?

If it wasn’t for Brexit the eyes of the country’s media would be firmly focussed on this government’s complete failure to understand or get a grip on the housing crisis. It gets noticed but only in second or third place.

By housing crisis, I mean all of it, housing shortage, homelessness, rents, security of tenure, landlord taxation, housing ministers with no background experience who stay in post for a few months, the whole nexus.

A Headless Chicken Announcement

This new green paper is the latest in a long line of headless chicken announcements.

Apparently, government sought the views of 7,000 people before setting out 5 core themes of the paper:-

I see that despite this New Deal the government still cannot step away from its obsession with homeownership in number 2 there, despite a quote from one social tenant just a few lines below it that says:-

“I am made to feel less of a person than the person that has bought their house.”

Yes love, because the government hates social housing and only wants a home-owning populace who will vote for them.

An obsession with home ownership

Which points us straight to core theme 1, the stigma of social housing, a stigma further advanced with this passage:-

“We are looking at reforms to help people using affordable home ownership schemes – like shared ownership”.

So if I’m reading this right, the 300,000 homes also being promised by 2020 is to increase stock for social tenants to become homeowners, again driving the notion that homeownership is all and that the person quoted as feeling ‘Less of a person’ is made to feel even less of a person by the same green paper.

Is this not missing the point of social housing? Is it’s only role to get councils and housing associations to build more homes so they can sell them at a discount? A cheap route to the same destination, home-ownership.

A laugh out loud moment

And I had to laugh out loud at this quote about tackling the stigma of social housing:-

“Rewarding the best neighbourhoods, for example, by funding events like street parties could ensure community pride is both encouraged and celebrated.”

Could you imagine some pinstriped, civil servant numb-nuts from Surrey, driving into Whitehall past increasingly blighted estates and saying to themselves,

“I know how to sort this out……street parties”.

A notion of some black and white Pathe newsreel version of a social housing estate where matronly women in housecoats and round Arthur Askey spectacles hang out the washing while the kids play on a rope swing attached to a lamp-post. Perleeeeeeaaaze!

You don’t create community pride by a government edict, community pride grows organically through the people who live there but you can destroy community pride with a government edict and that is what has been happening for years.

Karen Buck – from Nut-bag to highly commended

Core themes 4 and 5 are the obligatory and expected genuflection to the Grenfell tragedy, proposing a new regulator to replace the current one and as for ensuring homes are safe. Well, that’s already on the way through the Karen Buck initiative. Let’s not forget, an initiative that Conservative MPs talked out and voted against, until Grenfell.

After which Karen Buck was suddenly elevated from her previous status as raving socialist nut-bag to “My honourable friend is to be commended”.

As someone who works in the worst housing conditions I am always going to have an opinion on the matter and I don’t mind disagreeing when government announce something I think won’t work.

If they have at least considered the complexity of the subject – but the depressing thing about this green paper is it reads like someone babbling away to themselves in the day room of a home for the terminally bewildered.

Half cooked ideas thrown out in the hope that some of it might be well received while they turn their attention back to Brexit.

I mean, we’ve listened to 7,000 of you for Chrissakes, what more do we have to do? And we’ll even take onboard your ideas, just as long as we can still keep home ownership at the heart of it all.

Not in isolation

Trying to deal with the problems with social housing can’t be addressed in isolation from issues like “Affordable rents”, the right to buy, PRS rents, benefit caps.

No more than rough sleeping can be tackled with the promised £100m without looking at invisible homelessness, rent levels, universal credit etc.

In the press blurb for the green paper, the hilarious and inappropriately named James Brokenshire, Secretary of State for Communities, says in a distinctly Pathe newsreel kind of tone:-

“Regardless of whether you own your home or rent in the social sector, residents deserve security, dignity and the opportunities to build a better life.”

Also would their dignity and security not be better served by not selling off their communities to foreign property investors to build rabbit hutches at higher rents?

Here’s an idea for you

Here’s a thought and it’s not a particularly radical one. Why not turn the running of social housing estates over to the people who live there, with the social landlord acting in an administrative function?

It’s how housing cooperatives have run for well over 100 years and there are tenant led social housing landlords as well.

In 1976 Colin Ward wrote the excellent book “Housing – an anarchist approach” where he pointed directly at the heart of my thoughts on this green paper when he says:-

“The missing component in public housing policies: dweller involvement; anticipates today’s anxieties about the social effects of imposing official policies on people whose own perception of their housing needs has been systematically ignored.”

Arguing that:-

“The only future for the public housing, whether in our decaying cities or on new estates, is the tenant take-over”.

He isn’t talking about revolution there. Colin Ward was a reformist anarchist in the style of Peter Kropotkin, not a revolutionary one. He was famous for describing anarchism as a “Seed in the snow”. In other words, it isn’t a Utopian ideal, it’s going on all around us all the time, in credit unions, Pardoners, allotments, the Lake District Pound, local exchange trading systems, self-build.

Contrary to popular belief, Anarchism isn’t about bombs or starting riots, it’s a 2,000-year-old political theory of social organisation that holds that people’s needs are best met when the state butts out.

The ‘New Deal’ green paper is as good an argument for anarchy as I’ve ever read.

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Comments

There is no housing shortage. The ratio of dwellings to households is higher than ever. There is however a shortage of cheap dwellings (which criminals are exploiting).

Outside London rents have been rising at less than price inflation, in line with wage inflation.

In the past there was too much security of tenure and that was killing the PRS and was causing problems in the social sector too. There is still a bit too much security for bad tenants.

If social housing is used for those who society stigmatizes , rightly or wrongly, then others who use it will tend to also be stigmatised, rightly or wrongly, but unless we go back to making the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor I don’t see any solution.

I lived for many years in a development where the owners of the flats were in control of almost everything. The level of apathy was amazing. It was rare to get 5 people to turn out for an AGM. (out of 26),. We struggled to find people to act as directors,. Based on that experience I doubt that cooperatives would work much differently to existing systems, in practice.

I find your advocacy for enforcement of housing regulations hard to reconcile with the idea that the state should butt out. There is plenty of evidence that there are times when the state should intervene. For example in the first year of the Irish potatoe famine the Tory government acting on the patriarchal idea that it was their duty to help spent £100k on food aid, They then lost the elections and the Liberals actiong on the idea that it was best for the state to butt out stopped providing aid as the famine worsened. Millions of people died as a result.

The fundamental problem with governments (all parties) and housing is that they are economically ignorant.
They cannot distinguish spend and investment.

The state has the ability to borrow and create money at minimal cost.
When you “spend” a million pounds building property on land, the result is an asset worth more than a million pounds.
So the money is not spent, one type of asset becomes a different type of asset and the overall value increases.

Allowing local authorities to borrow from central government to build properties would generate revenue not “cost” anything.

@ Peter mounting an argument about anarchism v. the state in the comments section of a blog is akin to watching a newly formed Arsenal play Manchester City on the first game of the season. Something that I had to witness from my seat on Sunday and find any discourse woefully inadequate haha

What I will say is that unlike you, my experience in five years living in a housing cooperative myself is that I found it the 180 degree opposite to yours. The level of resident engagement was inspiring, as are the efforts of the residents of the Aylesbury Estate, down the road from me, fighting off the sale of their homes and communities to property developers.

As to your curiosity about how I can both be a vassal of the state at the same time as being an active anarchist, I have no internal ambiguity whatsoever. What gets me up in the morning is knowing I am protecting people from the activities of bullies, exploiting people’s basic needs for financial gain.

I have no liking for any bureaucratic state, neither capitalist nor socialist and as an anarchist I have no warmth towards the welfare state either. Were either to cease to exist I would still be doing my job, on a moral basis rather than a bureaucratic one.

‘JPK Yep.I completely agree. The green paper does nothing to address the restrictions on public borrowing to allow social landlords to build more homes. Government is like a chicken on the white line of home ownership, unable to see any other perspective

The Enforcement Officer's story

Ben Reeve Lewis has worked for Local Authorities for over 20 years.

First as a Tenancy Relations Officer and now as a freelance Enforcement Officer.

He is a regular writer for the Landlord Law Blog and has also appeared on TV - for example in the first series of Channel Five's Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlords.

In these posts, he talks about his work trying to help poor tenants in London and track down the criminal landlords who exploit them.

As well as giving his views - based on his experience as a practising enforcement officer - of government policy and practice.

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